With all the snow around at the moment, roads in Ireland are treacherous. Now the government has told us that there are only 2 days worth of grit available. Going to work is rapidly becoming an extreme sport.

Snow Covered Lane

Imagine though, if you didn’t have to leave your house. Imagine if all your work was available to you where ever you have an internet connection. That is the power of cloud computing. You can access your data anywhere. Not only that, you can also work on it.

There are loads of applications that are solely based on-line. In fact, you can do pretty much anything in web based applications. The only limitations seem to be video/imaging editing although even that is changing.

For business applications salesforce.com is definitely worth a look. If you are involved in sales, marketing or services having a salesforce account at the moment could be a life-saver.  The ability to log on from anywhere, even from an iphone or blackberry, offers a huge advantage over on premise software solutions, especially in the weather conditions we have at the moment.

Not to mention the fact that the TCO is lower for cloud based solutions. No need for expensive hardware or the staff to maintain it.

So if the climate (economic or meteorological) is bad, maybe you should be working in the cloud.